Jimmy91 said:
Not sure about the new name, though, what persuaded you to change it to "Obsess"?

A few years ago a friend was working on a project by the same name. He's not active anymore and something reminded me of it the other day. I was looking for a new name and that's what I went with. I'll probably change it again though; this is like the 4th name change :P. I almost went with "Abaddon"; would that be better? I'm open to suggestions for the map's name by the way :)

esselfortium said:
This looks really nice, though I fear the extremely high contrast of the large chunks of bright red in some of the darker areas might cause eye strain or visibility/playability problems.

Yea maybe, I was afraid of the same thing too. A few select areas might be a bit hard on the eyes, but I won't know how bad until I get the gameplay in. Hopefully the playtestesters will complain about it enough if it's really bad :P.

@RjY: About my sky transfers, I'm fairly certain everything is set up right. I've checked it over and over, but of course I still might be overlooking something. At the moment I've only got 3 or 4 different sky tags though so it's pretty easy to keep up with. I'll post a screenshot soon, but basically the sky is "misaligned" where there are differently tagged sky transfer sectors. Except that the sky texture is aligned properly....sooo, I have no idea what's going on. And actually, it's doing the same thing in MAP03 but it's a whole lot less noticeable, so I didn't bother to bring it up. At one point it was so bad that the regular Doom II sky was showing through in small slivers; tweaking with the control sector and the alignments of the sky seemed to have fixed it temporarily.

Mechadon said:
A few years ago a friend was working on a project by the same name. He's not active anymore and something reminded me of it the other day. I was looking for a new name and that's what I went with. I'll probably change it again though; this is like the 4th name change :P. I almost went with "Abaddon"; would that be better? I'm open to suggestions for the map's name by the way :)

From looking at the screenshots, the name that comes to my mind is "Convection".

Wait wait wait wait wait...crap, are they supposed to be aligned to all zeros? Lemme check...

By the way, thanks Snakes :D

*edit*

Yea that fixed it X_X. Good lord I got that all mixed up. I actually remember you explaining the sky transfer alignments on MAP03 essel. Somehow I got it all mixed up and assumed that the line of textures that make up the sky transfer line specials were supposed to be aligned, not set to the default alignment. Heh, thanks essel, as usual!

I can't remember if I mentioned it here or not, but I had plans to redo the MAP04 sky. It was supposed to be inspired by the E4 orange sky but ended up looking more like someone threw up a big, melted dreamsicle. The sky I used in MAP05 (the one you saw in the screenshots) came out a little lighter than I wanted. So what I did yesterday was make a brand new sky for MAP05 and then use the original as a base for MAP04's sky. The new MAP04 sky came out much better this time (because I used the actual colors from the E4 sky this time :P). I have some shots of the new MAP05 sky, so I figured I'd post them.

I'm not sold on the new sky. The Doom palette's lack of dark reds makes for a really awful transition from red to solid black; messing with the brightness and contrast of the reds you're using to better fit into the palette range could avoid this issue (assuming you've still got the original true-color source material to work with), but of course it'd mean your sky would look different.

Yea I know, the lack of dark reds made it difficult to work on, but I actually kind of like how it looks in-game. I would have liked a better black-to-red ramp to work with; whenever I palettized it, it would throw in a bunch of dark greens X_X. So I replaced them with dark greys and blacks and it looked marginally better. Well I thought it did anyways.

When I ran into that problem, I also tried bumping up the brightness of the reds like you suggested, but then it made the sky about as bright as the original, which I was trying to get away from :/. I'd say it's probably as good as it's going to get within my set of skills. Also I don't think I have the true color version of it anymore either. If you've got some other ideas to make it look better, let me know :)

*edit*

Hey, I wonder if there are any colors in the palette I can get away with replacing for some darker reds?

Well I spent a few too many hours trying to hack some darker reds into the palette. I actually got it working to where the sky looked really nice, but it fucked up a lot of the other red textures. What a waste of time that was :P. So I just broke down and decided to bump up the brightness of the reds so the gradients were smoother. I think it looks a lot better but it doesn't have that darker tone that I wanted. Oh well, I should stop stressing over the details. Here's a test shot, please let me know if this looks better:

Just thought I'd give a little bumpdate here. I started on the gameplay elements a few weeks ago but I haven't started hitting it hard until a few days ago now that I'm pretty much done with school this semester. I'm probably a little over a quarter of the way finished and so far I'm happy with how the flow is turning out. Monster placement is going to require a good bit more tweaking but I plan on having all of that somewhat smoothed out before I send it off to some private testers.

The actual gameplay is looking like it's going to be more non-linear than I had planned, which is fine with me. Although it won't be like MAP03 where it's completely non-linear. Instead you make your way through a linear section of the map at the beginning and then you come to a certain point where your opened up to a number of different paths (all of which have to be taken at one point or another). Towards the end it converges back to a linear flow all the way to the exit. I'm trying to keep the difficulty in check too. As of now there are some pretty balls-to-the-wall areas, many of which still require some balancing. I've been pretty liberal with Revenants so far, though I haven't had them spawn in as gigantic hordes. I'm far from making it a slaughter map though, and I'm actually trying to keep it from turning into that. Although there ares some key areas which will have some fairly high populations. All in all, I'm hoping it will be fairly difficult and varied. Especially since it's looking as though it will take a good 2 hours or more to finish the map, so I don't want it to feel too much like a grind fest.

The only thing that's sucking so far is that I keep hitting the sidedef limit. Yuck :(

One other thing I did while I was working on the sky texture again recently was tweak the statusbar. Here's a shot:

It might be hard to tell, but I updated the key display section and the ammo count background on the far right. I still want to update the actual number font for the big number counts but I haven't had a chance to get around to it yet. And I'm not really happy with what I did to the ammo count background either...I don't really think it looks any better than the older version. Any ideas there would be great.

So anyways, I'm going to keep chugging right along and hopefully I can have this map pretty much done before December is over, if not sooner. I'm really itching to get back into some more clean, techbase mapping since I'm going to start MAP01 next.

Heh, well thanks! I didn't think it was anything special but I'm glad you like it. It serves it's purpose well enough I suppose.

I was thinking, would anyone here be interested at all in a short gameplay video of some sort? I thought a change of pace from boring screenshots might be nice. I don't know how well I could pull it off...actually I'd probably try and recruit someone else to do the editing. But I dunno, just a thought.

Got any suggestions to improve it Kristus? I'm actually not too terribly worried about it but I'm always open to input. The ammo count on the right will probably be redone yet again (not sure how though) and the font is going to be tweaked or redone too.

The ammo count seems out of theme. And the open circuit behind the mugshot are distracting, it should be a plainer area IMO. (Maybe the circuit panel could work behind the ammo counts; just not behind the mugshot.)

That's a good idea about moving the techwall over to the ammo count on the right. I was coming up short on any ideas for it. And your the second person to say something about the techwall behind the mugshot being distracting, so I guess I better go with a flatter background like you suggested Gez. I'm not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to put some sort of background there now that I think about it :P. Thanks for the input!

*edit*

While I'm at it, I've got something else I could use some advice on. This time it's more gameplay oriented. I'm having a tough time deciding whether or not to make the lava damaging to the player. If it were any other map I would, but a good 40% of the time the player is forced into lava-filled areas. Given the length of the map, that's a lot of time to be trudging around in lava, looking for rad suits. At the moment I've got the lava doing minimum damage and I'm trying to be liberal with the radsuits, but I can't help but feel that it might make the map feel too distracting or annoying. Anyone have any thoughts? Should I just shut up and wait to see what the testers have to say about it?

Or, make more ground to stand on in the level. I mean, using the lava texture almost always confirms it's going to hurt the player, it's not like the blood and slime textures, where you don't really know if it'll hurt you or not. You could try and see what the blood texture would look like on the ground? Maybe that'll work instead.

Consistency is key. If lava doesn't hurt in that level, it shouldn't hurt in any following levels. Maybe Doomguy gained some weird lava resistance power by gobbling up so many soulspheres... Whatever the reason, there should be consistency.

If you weren't so close to the limit, I'd suggest making platforms -- maybe even raising platforms that have to be triggered from a secret switch -- that'd allow to limit exposure to lava.

I've actually had to cut back and simplify many of the existing "safe zone" platforms in some of the lava areas because of the sidedef limit :/. Unfortunately because I went totally nuts on this map, I don't have the room to add anymore structures aside from very simple gameplay things like voodoo conveyors, etc. At any given moment I probably have a little less than 30 sidedefs to work with before I have to cut or simplify something. The only thing I could really do is expand the area of some of those safe zones. I agree that it should be consistent across all maps, and at this point I'm not sure exactly if the other maps will need damaging floors or not. There's only one other map that might have lava in it, so I may not have to worry about that.

The problem I'm having is when most people see lava, they automatically think it's going to be damaging. That's usually a safe and general assumption and I didn't want to confuse the player by making the lava safe because of that. Then again, at least 40% of the map requires that the player enter into lava filled areas, some of which are pretty huge. I guess from reading the comments so far, the decision is going to have to be made between the damaging lava making sense or making it not so annoying.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here. Probably something about not going bat shit insane by maxing out the map limits :P

TrueDude said:
You could try and see what the blood texture would look like on the ground? Maybe that'll work instead.

I would try that, except that I spent a lot of time with transfer lighting to make all of the lava fullbright across the map. There would be a mountain of work I'd have to undo to remove that so there wouldn't be full-bright blood everywhere (I guess it would still sorta make sense, but not as much as lava).

Just another update. I finally finished all of the gameplay elements in MAP05 tonight after a good solid week's worth of work. I'm really glad to be done, but there's still a nice chunk of work to do before I move on. I'm going to go through it and clean up everything and make sure it's solid enough for the first round of testing, and then I'll send it out to a couple of guys for further input. Once all of that is said and done, I'll move on to MAP01. With any luck, I'll be able to finish the rest of the maps a whole lot faster than MAP05 :P

Well I sent this off yesterday to Jimmy91 and a couple of other guys for some quick testing. Jimmy was super fast with his initial playthrough and he seemed to approve of it. So I'm a little relieved. I thought for sure I reached critical mass on this map, which may have affected it's fun-value. But I need to hear back from the other guys too before I get too comfy. I'd actually like to get one more tester since Super Jamie is m.i.a. nowadays. So give a shout if your interested and I'll pick from there :)